Intelligent mobile devices including personal digital assistants (“PDA”s), smart phones, and small hand-held computers are becoming more common. Use of these mobile devices is no longer limited to technologically savvy professionals and increasingly these devices are being integrated into conventional business processes such as parcel delivery.
Customer lists, contact information, appointment schedules, etc., and other data important to a company may be stored in the enterprise database (e.g., the database or databases used by the corporate headquarters or divisional office). This information changes often, and the usefulness of intelligent mobile devices depends upon these mobile devices being notified as the information changes. Notification is the process in which a server program (e.g. a notification server) alerts a mobile device about a change in the enterprise data.
Individual employees within the company may employ different types of mobile devices and may require different notification interval requirements (e.g. some employees may need almost instantaneous notification while other employees may require notification only on a daily basis).
Current notification and synchronization solutions are not usually efficient because they typically serve only a specific device type and do not accommodate different types of mobile devices. Thus, the ability for one user to maintain multiple disparate mobile devices enabled and synchronized with enterprise data is typically not supported.
Current solutions often rely on the insecure and bulky model of replicating enterprise data outside of the enterprise. Such a model may be insecure because data stored outside of the enterprise databases may be more vulnerable to undesired disclosure. The model is bulky because large data stores may be employed to store the duplicated data. Additionally, current solutions typically do not provide the ability to detect if a mobile device is switched off or out of coverage and to stop notifying the device of enterprise database changes to prevent air-time loss.
Additionally, current solutions do not provide a mechanism for avoiding network flooding (i.e. when a large number of mobiles are all notified at once a large volume of network message traffic is loaded onto a corporate network). This large volume of network message traffic may cause undesirable delays in serving the needs of other users of the corporate network. Depending on the link layer protocol employed within the network and the physical routing of network links (depending on the topology of the network), the impact of this overloading of the network may cause the overall data throughput to drop off sharply as attempts to transmit create collisions and ensuing retransmission attempts contribute to the network flooding and further increase collisions.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for performing intelligent notification of mobile devices based on the mobile device type, such a system may notify based on network capabilities, the type of mobile device, or the status of the mobile device.